quest licensing services

Quest Licensing Services

Our Quest licensing services include audit defense, contract review and establishing your Effective License Position (ELP).

Quest licensing can often be challenging with its numerous licensing metrics and highly manual data collection process. Matters are not improved when considering the nature of its most prevalent product, Toad, and how easy it is to lose track of deployments even with the most stringent of controls in place. Coupled with Quest’s aggressive audit strategy, it is key to get a firm grasp of Quest software licensing in order to minimize risk. At ITAA we offer a range of Quest licensing services to help achieve this.

Our Quest licensing experts have a great deal of experience supporting clients with their Quest licensing needs. We outline some of our core software licensing services below, but please feel free to contact us with any query or concern you have – every situation is different and we are very happy to discuss your specific requirements.

  • Quest Contract Review

    With Quest’s longstanding presence in the market and an active history of mergers and acquisitions, it is possible for companies to end up with a diverse range of legacy contracts (all with valid terms and conditions) leading to confusion and potential conflicts. However, often these legacy contracts contain beneficial terms which would be lost if the company were to renew under current terms. Not to mention the other side of the coin, where visibility of license validity may be lost resulting from the various contract updates and transitions, furthering the difficulties in managing Quest entitlement.

    Our service aims to assist clients in reviewing all of their available documentation to:

    • Provide a clear baseline of current license entitlement.
    • Highlight any potential inconsistencies or areas of missing information for further investigation.
    • Detail any legacy terms and conditions that should either be preserved or renegotiated, depending on their value for the client’s estate.

  • Quest Effective License Position (ELP)

    One of the key difficulties in managing Quest compliance lies in the requirement to be able to accurately determine software deployments and access points. Many clients often find themselves in situations where they run multiple Toad deployments but end up losing visibility of which editions are deployed where or perhaps they have deployed software on Citrix servers but have not implemented correct controls to limit access. All of these factors lead to potential risk within the estate.

    Through our Quest ELP service, we will help you understand your licensing compliance by guiding you through the data collection process:

    • Indicating the critical data points for determining license consumption.
    • Clarifying the intricacies of the various license metrics.
    • Creating an ELP that details your current compliance against your entitlement.
    • Identifying potential consolidation opportunities or unnecessary shelfware within the environment.

    The aim of the deliverables is to assist you in understanding your environment, allowing you to:

    • Right size your licensing to reduce your annual spend.
    • Prepare you for a potential ELA exit.
    • Understand your current risks and how to resolve them prior to any potential audits.

  • Quest Audit Support

    With the acquisition by Francisco Partners and Elliot Management in 2016, Quest’s audit activity has ramped up significantly and in several cases has progressed to court proceedings (e.g. Nike and Fairview Health Services since 2018). Quest audits can be aggressive and often result in improbable findings based on impractical, hypothetical worst case scenarios. In such situations customers are left perplexed as to what is actually happening, with their confusion compounded by a lack of visibility resulting from custom discovery scripts and overwhelming license terminology.

    Our service will support you through the audit process by:

    • Clarifying the requests so you are fully aware of the key data points and calculations involved in determining your license compliance.
    • Supporting the data provisioning to ensure that only the mandatory data points are shared in a secure and anonymized manner.
    • Verifying any findings and claims made, challenging assumptions that are made with incomplete data.

  • Quest Licensing Services – Experience and Results

    Our Quest software licensing services draw on the extensive experience of our subject matter experts.  Previous consulting experience includes:

    • Assisting clients in understanding their license consumption through periodic reconciliations to manage their compliance in line with their entitlement.
    • Supporting ELA renewals by cost modelling the options and weighing them with the practicalities of managing the estate going forward.
    • Mitigating significant risks in client estates by identifying and rectifying process gaps in the management of access to Quest software.